It’s hard to pinpoint when it occurred, but the idea of the hipster is dead. Many are quick to blame bands such as Arcade Fire and Vampire Weekend that became too “mainstream,” but it is much more complex and convoluted than a band “selling out.” Being a hipster is a being part of an established counter culture. When that culture and all of its customs, including indie music, flannel and other thrift store clothing, becomes widely accepted by society, it ceases to be counter-culture.

When I was in grade school, I was the counterculture of Saint Francis Xavier (SFX). I listened to indie music while all of my peers listened to Top 40. I raved about “Inception”, “Memento” and Alfred Hitchcock when my peers were more interested in the latest action movies. It wasn’t cool to be counter-culture; my interests separated me from my peers and often made me the butt of many jokes.

At SFX, I pondered trying to be less different. LT caused me to have the completely opposite reaction. Being a hipster became a competition: a race to be the most different. If you weren’t buying unique clothing, listening to “underground” music and watching quirky and odd TV shows or movies, you were falling behind in the race, and if you weren’t winning, you were a poser.

Suddenly, it became cool to be a hipster. Long-time “underground” indie bands were becoming household names and songs about thrift stores were suddenly topping the charts. Popular culture snatched indie music and thrift store flannels right out of the counter-culture’s hand. Suddenly, hipsters were left without anything to identify themselves with.

So this begs the question, who is the current counter-culture? It’s often the people you’d least expect. They’re far different from their hipster predecessors: they don’t want everyone to know they are different, they simply enjoy being who they are and liking the things they like. Counter-culture listens to whatever music it pleases, without subscribing to the ideas that there are such things as “guilty pleasures” or bands that are “too mainstream.” Counter-culture wears whatever clothes make it happy, even if that means occasionally wearing practically the same thing they wore the day before. They are trying to counteract the pretentiousness the previous counter culture created.

If hipsters are no longer the counter-culture, how are thousands of people going to identify themselves? Do they continue to follow the trends they enjoyed that were once counter culture, or do they abandon all of them in favor of new clothes and new music, just for the sake of being different? The results with many will be more of an in between, still enjoying some of their music and not yet throwing out their flannels and thrift store clothing.

Don’t feel too bad for the counter culture, this is just what they wanted to happen. That’s the big secret about hipsters: we love it when you wreck our stuff. It brings hipsters great joy to say that the Black Keys’ last two albums were bad, that the Arctic Monkeys sold out and that Passion Pit hasn’t released anything worth listening to since their debut EP. (In actuality, hipsters would probably criticize even lesser known bands, like CHVRCHES and Milky Chance, but you get the point.) Sometimes we don’t even mean it, but it makes us feel better just to think that we aren’t even a little bit a part of popular culture, but instead on the opposing end of it.